Embodiments of the present invention relate generally to methods and systems for a collaboration environment and more particularly to providing a collaboration environment in which a number of different workspaces can use the same, reusable content.
The concept of a workspace or a team workspace provides a way for users to share and collaborate on data for specific purposes. Some examples of such workspaces are forums, white boards in the Internet domain and workspaces in several enterprise applications. One significant limitation with these existing solutions is that the workspaces operate on content physically present within the application. For example, workspace users can collect information from several sources, but such content has to be “copied” into the workspace before it can be shared with or used by members of the workspace. This results in a proliferation of content in the enterprise and requires that some workspace user periodically updates or refreshes the content.
Other collaboration applications provide an aggregated view of content via portals or portlets into the existing content information. However, even in this case, the workspace has as many portlets/channels as the number of disparate systems being used. More importantly, it is not possible for such portal based workspace users to treat content from different sources in a uniform manner. Also, such solutions cannot be used to associate content already present in the workspace with content available from another repository. One of the requirements/features of such solutions is that when the collaboration application provides full access to the external content, changes made by end users in one workspace are visible to all users accessing the content from another applications/channels as well. That is, the changes affect the external content and are not confined to the workspace in which they are made. The portal workspace solutions typically include metadata facilities to support these user requirements, but the portal metadata facility is confined to the portal views. Hence, there is a need for improved methods and systems for providing a collaboration environment using reusable content and for providing more unified metadata facilities for many interoperable collaboration environments, workspaces, and business applications for sharing, aggregating, and relating the reusable contents from multiple data sources.